San Antonio, Texas, United States
As a technology executive, I have operated on the principle that technology must serve as a strategic differentiator - transforming complex enterprise IT landscapes from traditional cost centers into engines of strategic business advantage. My leadership philosophy is rooted in being an "innovative doer," prioritizing tangible business outcomes over conceptual dreaming to deliver results faster and with uncompromising quality. With a track record of leading massive public cloud migrations, large-scale agile transformations, and enterprise automation programs across Fortune 500 companies, I build the operational muscle necessary to accelerate speed-to-market. As a progressive thinker holding over 90 patents, including foundational technology for Remote Deposit Capture, I am constantly looking toward the next frontier. Today, that means strategically leveraging paradigms like Agentic AI and radical platform simplification to drive significant operational efficiency and ensure our technology consistently outpaces the demands of the business.
In this role. peer to the CIO, I am responsible for Enterprise Architecture, Enterprise AI / Automation, IT Program Management, IT Infrastructure & Operations, IT Vendor Management and IT Strategy. Current Focus Areas: 1. Relentless Delivery of Business Outcomes - Partnering directly with Personal Lines, Commercial, Specialty and Life insurance leadership to leverage AI and Automation methods to deliver business outcomes faster with higher quality. 2. Radical Simplification of Major Platforms - 3 year program to retire 11 policy administration systems, 7 billing systems, 4 document management systems, and many more into a streamlined backend system that allows for easy functionality changes, industry leading uptime and more cost effective solutions. 3. Enterprise Automation & AI - Leveraging the latest in Agentic, Generative and traditional AI along with good ole-fashion automation to reduce process cycle time, reduce operational costs and increase compliance. Beyond operational efficiencies, I am focused on partnering with business leaders to use AI to create new revenue streams and grow the business. 4. Radical Re-invention of the Solution Delivery Process leveraging AI - Developing an entirely new way to develop software at 10X the speed of traditional development leveraging the latest AI tools from vendors such as Google and Anthropic. AI generated requirements, AI generated Test Cases, AI Generated Architecture, AI generated Code, Automated Testing, and Deployments. Software developers are not going away ... but they will develop software differently and much faster leveraging these tools.
In this role, I was responsible for setting the IT strategy and technical direction for USAA. Strategy and Technology oversight of Banking, Personal Lines Insurance, Investment businesses, Finance, HR, Application Infrastructure, Operational Infrastructure, Data & Analytics and Cloud technology domains
The Chief Technology Office is responsible for ensuring Silicon Valley Bank is future ready. Some activities include: 1. Informing the Organization on "Forward Compatible / Future Ready" technologies 2. Developing and Driving the Target Architecture for Core Capabilities 3. Developing and Delivering the Engineering Platform (Cloud, API, DevSecOps, Iaas/PaaS/SaaS) 4. Providing thoughtful Guidance and Governance over the Technical Estate 5. Holding the technology team accountable for staying ever-focused on delivering business value 6. Developing the next generation of technology professionals with relevant skills to meet current and future needs. 7. Technology Risk Management
Built and Lead the Enterprise Architecture function at Silicon Valley Financial Group. A newly formed group in 2021, our mission is to reduce technology complexity, minimize technical debt, build for the future and manage technology risk for a 250B enterprise across 20+ countries. Supporting Commercial Bank, Private Bank, SVB Securities and SVB Capital managing their technical estate to ensure SVB maximizes their technology investment across key domains such as lending, payments, liquidity, treasury services, trade financing, deposits and more. Building the Ignite lab, a small nimble incubation lab where new ideas can be quickly vetted and de-risked for further investment. A Fail fast, learn fast environment available across the enterprise for investment vetting, vendor bake-offs and limited pilot/POCs
The leader of a newly built organization responsible for developing the future state architecture, digital strategy, and ways of working for our Insurance solution applications/teams. Focused on 5 major work-streams: 1. Enterprise Public Cloud Enablement: Building key infrastructure to enable the safe/compliant use of Public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure. From low level capabilities like Identity Access Management, Asset Management, Networking, Cost Accounting, etc. to higher level functions like Function as a Service, Machine Learning, Image Ingestion, etc. 2. Scaled Agile & DevOps: focused on instrumenting and Automating the software delivery value stream. From Plan, Code, Test, Build, Deploy, Release, Operate and Monitor - each of these contribute the ability to safely build and deploy applications to production. Currently focused on expansion of the GitLab pipelines with automated testing, test data management staging, and promotion of code to our Open Shift and Public cloud environments. Our goal to increase deployment frequency while also improving stability. 3. Managing Technical Risk through simplification, standardization and automation: Building an IT Operational Risk program we call "TechRisk" to build automated controls and evidencing of our software development lifecycle into our new technology platforms to ensure we manage risk effectively while making it easier for developers to get quality code to production. 4. Kung Fu Talent Development: Kung Fu is an internal talent develop group we developed to help our staff upskill in newer technologies like cloud (AWS and GCP), Containerization (Open Shift and Kubernetes), Event Architectures (Kafka), Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Microservices and many others. 5. Quality Engineering - Developing simplified non-functional testing capabilities such as Accessibility, Performance, and Security testing into our automated pipelines.
Michael led application delivery and maintenance teams within the IT Property and Casualty (P&C) group (personal lines insurance). Directly responsible for an application development portfolio of $60M/Annual supporting the Homeowners, Rental, Rental Property, Fire, Flood, Umbrella, Boat and Valuable Property Insurance - $9B in annual revenue. Michael led an 18 month transformation to SAFe (Scaled Agile) for the IT P&C teams to include the launch of 14 Agile Release Trains (ARTs), portfolio & program management, work item management, new delivery metrics, synchronized iterations, large-scale planning events, communication/change management plan and leading the charge on the DevOps initiative within our group. In addition, founded a new research and development team (dubbed Scout & Discovery) focused on building test and learn capabilities allowing our business partners to rapidly try new business products/services with fast feedback loops to help shape future product roadmaps.
Led the IT Operational Excellence department at USAA responsible for running the business of IT. Responsibilities include assisting our Scaled Agile software development rollout, leading our DevOps journey, setting direction/governance for Quality Assurance, Process Engineering across IT (process excellence), Problem Management, IT Metrics and Reporting, IT communications/marketing and IT financial management.
Manager of Web Development responsible for development, maintenance and architecture of the company's customer portal called BCWebTrack. Converted development processes from waterfall to Agile XP (eXtreme Programming) and TDD (Test Driven Development) Implemented defect tracking software, release management, Development Wiki for developer notes (using TRAC). co-developed custom code for TRAC allowing for better team metrics Led software development improvement projects such as the conversion of the source code repository from Visual Source Safe to Subversion, Automated check-ins, builds, releases and continuous testing processes.
Team Lead for the web development projects. Responsible for primary development (project lead), architecture and maintenance of several mission critical applications such as the Customer Accounting system, the Customer Service Call Center application (access to over 720 million online call records), the website security subsystem, DB maintenance (terabytes of data, and over a dozen online servers) and various others. Heavy use of OO programming, UML, Design Patterns (MVC, Registry, ORM, Abstract Factory, Envelope/Letter, Decorator) Co-developed testing framework using Ruby and WATIR, and converted the entire development process to TDD (Test Driven Development).